Maybe There is Hope?
Note: At Temple Micah, every b’nai mitzvah student gets to ask their rabbi a question of their own choosing to be answered by the rabbi as part of their sermon the morning of the b’nai mitzvah. This is one of those sermons.
Dear Lilah,
You asked me this:
In a moment when it is really hard to have hope, how do you keep going?
Lilah - this is a difficult moment.
Challenge is layered onto challenge -
History seems to be repeating itself at a rapid pace
The present is difficult enough to endure,
Let alone looking at the future
So how do we have hope? How do we keep going?
The rabbis of the Talmud, too, have this question - “In times of such despair, how does the world itself keep going?”
This is a question our people have been asking for millennia:
The prophets when they saw their Temple destroyed.
When we were exiled
When we were cast away for centuries
When we were forced to flee
When we were blamed and punished for crimes that were not ours
When we were murdered
Our teacher, Rabbi Hoffman wrote his students a letter this week, saying this: “We fear the worst. How will we keep going?””
His recommendation - “Start with brutal honesty.”
We are right to fear - Lilah.
We fear that we will not be able to protect the most vulnerable or shelter those seeking refuge
We fear the rampant resurgence of antisemitism.
We fear that events like what happened this week in Amsterdam will continue and worsen.
We fear the democracy that protected us for these centuries will crumble - and for a wider world that seems to be becoming less free and less democratic
We fear that peace is further than closer -
We fear for our planet - whether it can survive what we’ve done to it -
If we are going to face our future - we have to know what is at stake
And we have to be honest with the reality of it
Not because we think that it can’t change -
Exactly the opposite. Because we have to know it to change it.
And we have to admit what we don’t know -
We don’t know where these fearsome paths may take us
And while that uncertainty is scary -
The honest - the brutal honesty - about our uncertainty is what allows hope to live
We can’t be naive. But we also should be honest that we don’t yet know how this story ends -
We want to have a future, and we want to be involved in the dreaming of it -
Author Rebecca Solnit writes:
“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.”
In this moment, we embrace the unknown -
Because in the unknown - that is where hope is born.
We hear her calling -
As Mary Oliver reminds us, “Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.”
Her screams, are what sociologist Peter Berger calls “a signal of transcendence.” It pushes us beyond our current human situation. It isn’t rational - but it is necessary. Berger continues:
“Human existence is always oriented towards the future. Humans exist by constantly extending our being into the future, both in our consciousness and in our activity... An essential dimension of this "futurity" of humanity is hope. It is through hope that we overcome the difficulties of any given here and now. And it is through hope that we find meaning in the face of extreme suffering.”
We don’t know the future - but we have to extend our being into it -
The fear - in all its brutal honesty - can feel like the end of the future. The end of the study. But writing the end of the story prematurely is lazy, Lilah.
It excuses us from action -
As Vaclev Havel comes to teach us again:
“[Hope is] not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is this hope, above all, that gives us the strength to live . . . even in conditions that seem . . . hopeless . . .In the face of . . .absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.”
Hope says that life is worth it
Hope says that you will have a future
Hope says that after this winter there will be blossoms again
Hope says that you should get married and build a life and make joy for others
Hope says that you should care
Because all of it matters
Every act of it extends you into the future
Because hope, Lilah, is not an emotion.
It is an act.
A practice which must be cultivated.
--
Our ancestors had this kind of hope.
The Book of Lamentations - a devastating account of the destruction of the Temple - contains a single phrase that screams out above the wailing and weeping:
אולי יש תקוה
“…Maybe there’s hope?”
“…Maybe there’s hope?”
There is a story in the Talmud that whenever Rav Ami would read this verse, he would begin to weep.
כולי האי ואולי, - “all of this” - all of this pain and suffering - and only maybe?
Only maybe there is hope?
What we learn from our later teachers , Lilah, is that Rav Ami misunderstood the verse, and that led to his sadness
Not “maybe there’s hope,” But “if there is hope.”
We should understand that what poet of Lamentations wrote for us those thousands of years ago was this:
You must act as if there is hope.
As if there is hope
Don’t write the end of the story prematurely.
When you look at the unknown future -
And the easier option seems to be to give up fighting
You choose hope -
Even if it seems irrational, unpractical, or easier to numb and shut down
You go into the world
In the active practice of hope
And you do this knowing that you are not alone in your choice
You are part of a people who have dug for sparks of hope through all of our darkest moments
You are part of a people who have survived
Who have given us the gift of an active practice of hope
It was an act of hope when Noah built a window into his ark not knowing if he would even be able to see through the churning waters.
It was hope when he sent out a raven, and then a dove - hoping for dry land - despite all the evidence that the world had been drowned.
It was hope when Abraham and Sarah set out on a journey to an unknown land despite it clearly meaning they would be abandoning all they had ever known.
It was hope when the Israelites crossed the sea out of Egypt despite the chariots and Pharaoh’s army behind them, and with barely a memory of what was on the other side awaiting them.
It was hope when Moses stood on Mt. Nebo and watched his people march into their unknown future, despite knowing with certainty that he would never experience that future himself.
It was hope when Jeremiah gazed out at Jerusalem laid waste, and still heard for himself a song of celebration that would one day return to the city
It was hope when our people packed up their lives again and again: from Israel; from Rome; from Medina; from France; from England; from Spain; from Poland; from Russia; from Algeria; from Libya; from Tunisia; from Iraq; from Afghanistan; from Yemen… our people packed up their lives again and again and again, and with hope put down new roots
And it was hope when our people stayed and fought
And it was hope when our people planted trees in their old new land
We have a beautiful inheritance - this active practice of hope
It is not the feeling that it will all just turn out ok
But the active hope that despite everything to the contrary, it makes sense to walk forward anyways.
Hope is the knowledge that somewhere, someday there is a promised land.
Our hope is not lost. Our hope can not be stolen. We will not be stolen.
Lilah, you stand up today -
An active symbol of hope
For what the future can look like -
For the idea that there is a future worth investing in, and hoping for it.
We promise to be right by your side, dreaming and hoping for a world you deserve.
Mazel tov, Lilah.
In active hope,
Your friend,
Rabbi Crawley